Judge To Newspaper - Reveal Name of Commenter 307
First time accepted submitter Andy Prough writes "A Kansas judge has ordered a Topeka newspaper to release the name of a commenter on one of its stories about the trial of Anceo D. Stovall for the murder of Natalie Gibson. Using the name 'BePrepared,' the commenter posted the following in response to a story about the ongoing trial on July 21 at 1:45pm: 'Trust me that's all they got in their little world, as you know, I have been there. Remember the pukes names they will do it for ever.' The problem? The court is convinced that 'BePrepared' was a juror, and was not supposed to be accessing news about the trial before it ended on July 24th. The court wants BePrepared's name, address and IP address. The jury was ultimately unable to find Stovall guilty of 10 of the 11 charges against him — including murder. Both defense and prosecution lawyers appear to want a new trial, and if it turns out that BePrepared was a juror, they are more likely to get their wish."
News? (Score:5, Insightful)
News why?
- Juror suspected of perjury.
- Court issues order to place that published posts which have a reasonable chance of providing evidence of said perjury, to provide the bare minimum of information to identify the poster.
- If it's not him, end of case.
- If it is him, file for mistrial, pursue conviction against him.
Why is this news? This is bog-standard legal procedure for any medium whatsoever (e.g. newspaper letters page would be the same, or CCTV of him in a pub meeting the defendant, or whatever).
Because "The Internet" means you should be anonymous, untraceable and able to commit criminal acts? Is that the logic?
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
Except it's not perjury. :) The juror is accused of violating sequester rules, not of lying under oath.
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
The last time I was a juror I had to swear under oath that I would not/did not access outside sources of information about the trial at hand.
Re:News? (Score:4, Funny)
The last time I was a juror I had to swear under oath that I would not/did not access outside sources of information about the trial at hand.
Yeah but anyone too dumb to get out of jury duty is not credible.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because if I were on trial, I'd want a bunch of morons on the jury. Only idiots brag about getting out of jury duty. The idea is that you approach it as a civic duty and you hope to hell your jury members do too if you're ever on trial.
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I had jury duty I could easily have gotten out of it, but chose instead to be a productive citizen and not do so.
Anyone who approaches jury duty with the "I want out of this" attitude should certainly not be sitting on one. They are far less likely to take the responsibility seriously, thus leading to dumb fucking decisions like the Samsung/Apple $1bn judgement.
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
From what I can tell, statistically nobody getting paid hourly gets paid by their employer for jury duty. It's vanishingly rare. On the other hand, if you're salaried, no problem, they can't fire you. On the gripping hand, that work still has to get done. If you're the only network admin of a smallish internet business or something like that, you probably don't have time for that shit. Most of the time courts are happy to give you a deferment though, and they'll just put you back into the pool and call you again later.
Re:News? (Score:4, Informative)
In Massachusetts, it's the law. http://www.mass.gov/courts/jury/compensa.htm#INFORMATION%20FOR%20EMPLOYERS:%20RIGHTS%20AND%20OBLIGATIONS [mass.gov]:
Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
People get the government they deserve. If you can’t take time out of your life to ensure that we have a civil and just society, don’t expect society to be civil and just.
Oh, and vote next Tuesday.
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I might argue that if it was truly a civil and just society, then it would not generally ever be case that citizens would be unable to take time out their lives to help preserve that society on account of the financial distress it would cause.
At the very least, I believe that jury duty should compensate a person fairly (with an amount that is at least comparable to their current income levels). If that were the case, I expect you'd find substantially fewer people would be trying to avoid it.
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Lt’s say you have a self-important person who gets called into jury duty on a big, long trail – say Bill Gates (back in the 90s) or Warren Buffet are called in for a murder trial. Do we:
A: Pay them a week’s worth of income or
B: Exempt them from jury duty because they are rich?
I don’t like either choice.
It is not just money that makes a system civil and just – it is the time and energy that average citizens put in. Citizens 100 years ago – who are much poorer than we are
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People get the government they deserve. If you can’t take time out of your life to ensure that we have a civil and just society, don’t expect society to be civil and just.
Oh, and vote next Tuesday.
If i register to vote, then I might get asked to do jury duty, and people are saying they don't want morons in the jury box...
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I'd really like to serve. But only when its not a major hardship for my business. I have only been requested to sit in a jury pool four times in my life. On every occasion, it coincided with my involvement in submitting a bid or proposal for a contract. Putting my paranoia hat on, I suspect that a competitor may have a buddy working at the court clerk's office. And they submitted my name for their pool.
On the other hand, when I've had some free time, I called the court and asked if I could volunteer for a
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Each time I've been called, I was given the option to reschedule my service to sometime in the next year. Last time I was called I did so and served on the date I'd scheduled (though I wasn't empaneled.) So if you know that bids/proposals are most often due on a Monday, schedule your service for a Wednesday or Thursday.
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You can't do that if you dodge jury duty....when you're on a jury, you are one of the most powerful people in the US, think of it that way....
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In the county in which I reside, if you "get out of jury duty" you still have to sit in the jury pool for three days of active on-site time and seven more days of "on-call" status.
Your best bet is to stop your fucking whining, do the damn trial for a day or two, and go home. My companies pay for jury duty so aside from it being a pain in the fucking ass being that we only have one car and the courthouse is 30 miles out in the middle of nowhere, it was better than being at work.
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It should be mandatory that all companies pay for entire length of jury duty, and if they did...more people might want to do it.
My company pays for 3x days of jury duty a year...that's it, period.
After that,
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Jury duty is fine and dandy for those of us with good jobs and flexible schedules. For a lot of people, it is a real financial problem.
I am with you. It should be mandatory that all
Re:Getting out of jury duty (Score:3)
I've only been a juror on one trial, but my impression was that the judge was accepting rather lame excuses from people who wanted to get out. Perhaps he felt the same way you do.
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If there are enough jurors who don't mind serving, the judge will dismiss those who express the desire to not serve. But if everyone wanted off the case (say it was promising to be a lengthy civil suit that would have kept you all in the courtroom for two months,) he probably wouldn't have let them go so easily.
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In my opinion, most people who hate jury trials have never sat on a jury. I have. And I was proud to do so, because it was one of the two very specific duties I have as a citizen (the other being voting). And I was confident in our verdict (guilty of felonious assault, defendant had attacked the victim with a knife).
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Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every jury I have been called for, I was excused from in the voir dire. Apparently, being a physicist, technologist, and having a broad range of knowledge about geopolitical, local, and national issues makes you too smart for one team or the other.
The last one I was in the selection pool for, I was called in on the first day, seated first in the jury box, and survived until the last strike from the defense team. I was the last person that they rejected. Pissed me off because it took 4 days to get to that point.
I have come to the conclusion that one side or the other is always interested in having morons sitting in the box.
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
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Yes, this is a good point. Should jurors be paid at minimum wage? At average per capita? At their current rate? What about child care? What about job guarantees so you don't get fired while you're on jury duty?
"government...they" - you probably meant "government....we"
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What sort of job would fire you?
I thought that was illegal. It surely should be.
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Employers can't fire you, but if you're paid an hourly wage, they don't have to pay you while you're on a jury (according to the juror handbook, they're "encouraged to").
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
It is. Title 28, section 1875 : "No employer shall discharge, threaten to discharge, intimidate, or coerce any permanent employee by reason of such employee’s jury service, or the attendance or scheduled attendance in connection with such service, in any court of the United States"
Bolded is the loophole you can sail the Enterprise through. If you're a contractor or doing a temporary job, your ass is hanging in the breeze.
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I was under the impression that there was.
But yeah... the fact that a juror gets paid so little can amount to a huge amount of disruption to their lives, and it's quite understandable that people would want to go out of their way to avoid it.... much as they will go out of their way to avoid doing things that they perceive are likely to cause them other types of pain or suffering (it's not that jury duty itself is necessarily pain
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
Minimum wage would be an excellent place to start. It doesn't send a great message when they set minimum wage laws and then can't be bothered to pay even that for one's oh-so sacred civic duty. I'll leave aside for the moment the fact that in many areas, minimum wage isn't enough to live on.
And yeah, I'm sticking with "they." Let's not kid ourselves; you and I are not in charge, and discussions about the nature of self-government are academic when you're missing your rent payments.
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, this is a good point. Should jurors be paid at minimum wage? At average per capita? At their current rate? What about child care? What about job guarantees so you don't get fired while you're on jury duty?
"government...they" - you probably meant "government....we"
Not getting fired is covered. Here's the relevant text from the Kansas courts: "(c) State law should prohibit employers from discharging, laying off, denying advancement opportunities to, or otherwise penalizing employees who miss work because of jury service." Looks like other states have similar policies.
The self-employed are kind of screwed, too, in addition to the people you mentioned, since the law wouldn't protect them from losing business because they had to close up shop.
Hardship isn't considered a reason to be excused form jury duty, but being affected by the hardship can be if the worry you're experiencing would make you unable to fulfill your duty to pay attention and be "fair and impartial".
Actual example from my one day of jury duty:
Brain surgeon asks to be excused. He has patients to operate on.
Judge: Having something else to do is not a reason to be excused.
Doc (in standard-issue neurosurgeon bow tie): I have patients scheduled tomorrow!
Judge: No, that's not a reason to be excused, as long as you can be fair and impartial. Your patients' welfare is not the question here. Can you be fair and impartial?
Doc: I would try my best to be. But my patients are scheduled for surgery.
Judge: Could your worry about your patients impair your ability to be a fair and impartial juror?
Doc: I'd try my best.
Judge: But would the anxiety from being in court and not caring for your patients impair your judgement as a juror?
Doc (finally catching on): Yes . . . I would be worried about my patients the entire time, and it could affect my ability to devote myself to jury duty.
So it doesn't take a brain surgeon to get out of serving, but the judge might need to help a little.
Parsing the meaning of "should" (Score:2)
.
I notice that the courts phrasing is "should prohibit" rather than "does prohibit" or "prohibits". This could simply be poorly worded, but considering that the court's main business is to parse the specific wording of laws, I would be a little
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If you don't like it, vote for a higher minimum wage.
This is the same reason congresscritters should receive a salary based on the minimum wage. Say, capped at double.
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They used to pay legislators a lot less, because for most people it was a part-time job.
However, they realized that the only people who could then be legislators were people who were well off. A common worker cannot shift easily from legislator work to whatever they do because that sort of work can be seasonal, and it will certainly mess with whatever advancement that you might achieve if you are gone for weeks at a time in sessions.
You should definitely pay legislators a reasonable middle class wage, but
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Why?
Do you think they should pay you to vote too?
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Ignoring the fact that yeah, I think that might not be a bad idea.... voting is something that only takes a couple of hours out of one day every few years to do. You don't even have to take a full day off of work to do it.
Jury duty, on the other hand, can be significantly more disruptive, because it can extend for multiple weeks, throughout which a person will forfeit their normal income, and could result in potentially very high levels of financial stress.
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I am lucky that I continue to draw pay if I get selected for jury duty. Legislating that seems like the simplest fix. Then allow the company to use it as a deduction come tax time. This means the state does not need to pay anyone, and no new government structures are needed.
As far as pay for voting, I think we just need a federal holiday. One that fines any business that stays open, outside of obviously critical things.
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Voting Day should be a federal holiday, and businesses that choose to stay open must provide paid time off for employees working that day to visit their polling places.
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I've never actually missed work to vote, and I have voted in every election I could since I turned 18. The rules vary by jurisdiction, but here in Canada, employers need to give you 3 contiguous hours during the time the polls are open in order to vote. The polls open at 8am, and close at 8pm. Just go in to work late (what I usually do, the polls are less busy in the morning), or go in early and leave early.
There's also advance polls, and special ballot (mail-in) that you can vote by, if your work schedule
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That depends entirely on your voting place. In some areas the waits can be many hours.
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Which many people will not be able to get off.
You and me it will be no problem, but hourly employees are not going to be able to take it, and surely not all of them.
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I believe at least around here..the polls open before 6am.
Do what I do...get up early that day...vote and get it over with.
Or, if you live in Chicago...vote early and vote often.
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Yeah, because if I were on trial, I'd want a bunch of morons on the jury. Only idiots brag about getting out of jury duty. The idea is that you approach it as a civic duty and you hope to hell your jury members do too if you're ever on trial.
lol, okay, there is 1 thing I do not ever hear about jury duty, that is people do it for civic duty. I hear people bitch because they have to take time off a job that pays considerably more per hour then jury duty. Which generally means they want to get it over with as fast as possible. Swift justice? No, willing to go with the majority, even if they don't feel like it's the truth.
Or worse, you get old people who are out of touch with modern life and making decisions based on how they think things s
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Lawyers like morons on the jury. They're easier to manipulate. You'll often find that lawyers move to strike potential jurors that might be too smart and might want to bring things up like Jury Nullification, question evidence, or go Henry Fonda in the jurors' room.
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I remember being called three times. Once I got out of it because the date for which I was scheduled was a week after I was scheduled to move out of the county and that was one of the allowed reasons to have it cancelled. Once I had it switched to a different court (in the next town over from where I live) because it would have taken me about two hours to get to the courthouse (damn gerrymandered counties) and when I showed up at the closer court on the appropriate day I was not selected. The other time I w
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First time I was called to Jury Duty was when I was 22. A Deputy showed up at my Parent's home with a Warrant for my arrest on failure to appear for jury duty.
My parents told him that he would be unlikely to find me since I was in the Navy on a ship somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. About a week later, we got our first shipment of mail in about 30 day. Inside was my Summons. I dutifully filled out that I was unavailable and sent it back. About 2 months later, I heard from my parents abou
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That way, they could know the law better....make more intelligent decisions maybe?
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
I guess if you're ever on trial you'll be judged by a jury of your peers.
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Except he wouldn't be because all of his peers would be trying to get out of jury duty. He'd be tried by responsible and probably more intelligent people. He'd be fucked.
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The internet means you should be able to commit anonymous speech acts. That's what some of us feel, anyway.
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not about his speech act. It has absolutely nothing to do with what he said or where he said it. However, the act of posting may be evidence that he broke other rules/laws unrelated to speech - anonymous or otherwise.
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
And had the site not retained information pertaining to his identity, what would they have done? Nothing.
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Re:News? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh...sorry...you meant we should be able to say what we want on somebody else's website and they should never reveal our details...well that's a little different. Tell you what, let's try an experiment, you set up your server and post the details here, then we'll all come along and post what we want, see where that gets you.
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Next up, the government collects all emails sent by anyone in the search for evidence of crimes.
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I don't get why anyone would divulge their full address just to comment on a website. I checked out the site, and they do ask for a handle, password, email address, real name, address, and phone number. I'd never fill that stuff out to post a comment on a news story - the danger of data breaches makes me minimize such disclosures.
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I think there's a step zero:
-Commenter suspected of being juror.
- Juror suspected of perjury. - Court issues order to place that published posts which have a reasonable chance of providing evidence of said perjury, to provide the bare minimum of information to identify the poster. - If it's not him, end of case. - If it is him, file for mistrial, pursue conviction against him.
Why is this news?
I think it's news because it might not be him. If so, they still got the ID of someone who made an anonymous comment. Couldn't you often find something like "he could have been a juror" or similar to unmask anonymous commenters whose actions wouldn't have otherwise been illegal, just inconvenient to the authorities, for example?
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
It is. Nobody's charged him yet.
But are you suggesting that it's illegal to gather evidence by asking a court for a court order to reveal the data of visits recorded to a website?
Evidence-gathering isn't restricted to just what you are freely given. If it was, almost everyone would get away with crimes.
What you're implying is that if I raid a bank, and the court orders the shop across the street to reveal its CCTV records of that day, that's somehow prejudicial to justice?
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its news as its a bad precident that could easily be abused if allowed to proceed as it is.
I agree criminals should be dealt with, but not at the cost of another's rights.
The Constitution says you have a right to free speech. Nowhere does it say you have a right to anonymous speech.
Re:News? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, but that all goes out the window if you are not really anonymous. Wishing you were anonymous and actual being anonymous are two different things. If the paper has the requested information, then he isn't anonymous.
There is no law that says anyone must respect anyone else's wish to be anonymous.
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Yes, but that all goes out the window if you are not really anonymous. Wishing you were anonymous and actual being anonymous are two different things. If the paper has the requested information, then he isn't anonymous.There is no law that says anyone must respect anyone else's wish to be anonymous.
That makes absolutely no sense. If the US Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymous speech and this individual was trying to remain anonymous and had reasonable belief that he was, then the government violation of this anonymity would be in conflict with his constitutional rights. Until the government forces the newspaper to provide identifying information, he is in fact anonymous.
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If the US Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymous speech and this individual was trying to remain anonymous and had reasonable belief that he was, then the government violation of this anonymity would be in conflict with his constitutional rights.
There's a difference between disallowing anonymous speech versus trying to uncover the source. The case where the quote is from is McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission [wikipedia.org], "the Court held that an Ohio statute that prohibits anonymous political or campaign literature is unconstitutional". [bold mine]
In this case, the court is trying to investigate a violation of judicial procedure. To claim that anonymous speech prevents them from investigating isn't substantiated by the Supreme Court.
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In this case, the court is trying to investigate a violation of judicial procedure. To claim that anonymous speech prevents them from investigating isn't substantiated by the Supreme Court.
You're likely correct. I wasn't commenting about this specific case but the OP's twisted logic.
There's a difference between disallowing anonymous speech versus trying to uncover the source.
Perhaps, but in practice the line is so fine as to be invisible. For example, if the government doesn't have a law prohibiting anonymous speech but in practice requires ISPs to log identifying information of all users and then requires the ISP to provide this data upon request so that they can unmask the anonymous speaker, where's the difference? Whether proactive or reactive, you still have prevented anonymous
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Nope, you're wrong. Exercise of your rights does not put requirements on anyone else. Yes, you have a right to make anonymous speech. No, nobody has to provide a venue for you to do so. Exercising your rights is entirely up to you, and nobody else.
If you tell a newspaper (intentionally or not), "Hi. I am Joe. Please publish this for me" you are not anonymous. They know who you are - you told them. What you are suggesting is that it is now the newpaper's responsibility to provide some anonymity for yo
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In this case, the content of the speech is totally irrelevant. It is suspected that the poster was a juror, who had no legal right at that point in time to read a newspaper, and the fact that he posted _anything_ is evidence. No matter what he posted.
In this case, it would be r
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Bad precedent? The rights of judges to issues subpoena is in the constitution. The importance of looking for judicial misconduct is in the bible. I'd say whatever precedents exist have been in place quite a while.
Seems reasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really have a problem if they're investigating whether a juror made the posting.
Assuming that, if the poster was not a juror, they will retain their anonymity.
The "release the name" isn't "print it in the newspaper", it's released to the court, which won't release it further... will it?
Re:Seems reasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course in Europe, all this info is logged by the ISP's anyway, by law.
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You record a cryptographic hash of the IP address. You don't ban by IP, but by this hash.
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Assuming a normal hash function with IPv4 it would be trivial to run every IPv4 address through the hash function until you found the one(s) that matched.
With IPv6 if you hashed the whole address it would become impractical to do that. However banning by the complete IPv6 address is likely to result in a pretty ineffective ban. If you only include the part that is likely specific to a customer (as apposed to amachine within a customers lan) then it's probablly feasible to brute force it (especially if you
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You probably ban by the first /64 of the IPv6 address which is effective and incidentally is also too big (current technology) to use the brute force run through the hash algorithm. A nice lucky midpoint we are in right now.
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You probably ban by the first /64 of the IPv6 address which is effective
Thinking about it i'd probablly agree with you. Some ISPs give their customers more than one /64 but frankly anyone who knows how to change which /64 their lan is using probablly has other methods of ban evading available.
incidentally is also too big (current technology) to use the brute force run through the hash algorithm
Note that while the ipv6 unicast internet is nominally 2000::/3* all IPv6 addresses allocated to RIRs or other global unicast uses so-far have been from one of the following prefixes (this is a summary of http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-unicast-address-assignments/ipv6-unicast-address [iana.org]
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It doesn't solve the problem, but at least it minimizes it. Only people who have been banned will lose their anonymity. Assume, for example, that only 1% of visitors are banned, then the problem is now two orders of magnitude smaller.
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We only record a cryptographic hash of the IP address of people who have been banned.
To place a ban you need to know what to put in the ban. That means if you are banning by a hash of the IP then you need to record that hash of the IP for any action you might want to use as the basis for a ban.
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It's not a great scheme, admittedly, but at least it's better than status quo.
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who cares about their rights?
What rights? The last two governments have taken the rights out of the Bill of Rights, leaving us with just the bill.
What? (Score:3)
How does anybody read that gibberish and come to the conclusion that the commentor is a juror? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense?
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There's some context that was not printed.
Yes, I couldn't make any sense out of his post either and I assumed there must be some additional context not in the article. Maybe the juror in question always talks in idiotic gibberish?
Not 4 Aces (Score:2)
Both sides want a new trial? (Score:2)
Both defense and prosecution lawyers appear to want a new trial,
Can someone clued into the legal situation here fill me in on why they can't just get a new trial if both sides wants one?
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Nowhere does it say that. It says they were not able to find him guilty. It has to be unanimous to either find innocent or guilty, and it wasn't.
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He was found innocent of 10 of the 11 charges.
For the defense, that's 1 too many. For the prosecution, that's 10 too few. I'm sure there's more to it, but...
That's exactly how I saw it.
Grasping at straws (Score:2)
So this guy supposedly accessed a story WHILE the jury was in deliberations? One would think, that were this person on the Jury, one of the other jurors would have witnessed this?
Nothing about the comment even hints that a juror or someone with knwoledge of the specific case said it. This seems like grasping at straws to me.
Accessing the media? (Score:2)
So is this an issue of a juror posting a comment to the local paper? Or a juror reading the news in that (or other) papers concerning this trial? because if its the latter, there could be numerous jurors who read it but didn't submit a comment.
If our system depends on jurors keeping themselves ignorant of current events rather than being able to ignore information from outside sources, we're screwed.
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Re:Dangrous precident (Score:4, Insightful)
...so the alternative to giving a public speaker's name to the government is that a juror's name is released to a newspaper?
Now that's a dangerous precedent...
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If you remove the Internet from the equation, how does it look?
A credit card was used at Location X and the card is suspected to belong to John Doe, who is not lawfully allowed at Location X. The police request enough information to determine whether the card belonged to John Doe or not. If the card does not belong to John Doe, the matter will be dropped. If it does belong to John Doe, then the matter will be pursued as a violation of John Doe being at Location X unlawfully, but the credit charge itself is
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What should happen at the most is that the name is given to the newspaper, and they verify if its them or not.
Newspapers aren't empowered to conduct official investigations. They are empowered to conduct unofficial ones in the public interest.
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It doesn't say they found him innocent, it says they were unable to find him guilty. In other words, a hung jury.
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I'll assume and hope that the paper does not have the person's real name. This can only lead to fishing expeditions on other issues where the authorities will demand that people identify themselves. These kinds of demands must be resisted, or there will be to pay down the line.
I know where you're coming from but I think you're overreacting. Yes we all have a certain amount of 'expectation of anonymity' online, but in the circumstance where you are either breaking the law online, or demonstrating that you have broken the law, why would you expect the establishment to respect your desired anonymity?
If you genuinely desire anonymity online:
1. Use Tor or something similar to obfuscate your IP address.
2. Don't use an account that is attached to any personally identifiable informa